Any reason needed?!? We can all see what he’s done!
replyI agree, but there's still a big "Why now?" question in my head. I suspect the board knows of something even more spectacularly stupid he's about to do.
replyThere is a hearing on Sep 30 as part of the WPE vs Automattic/WP trial where they will decide of Matt allegedly destroyed evidence. Matt apparently had automatic deleting messages enabled on his platforms, even throughout the period where they were supposed to be preserving it. His side said it was due to his "romantic partners", but his lawyers argued during the whole time everything had been preserved when it appears it wasn't. So the result of that hearing may came with a pretty big bill attached to it for all the legal time that was wasted for the other side, as well as instructions for the jury etc to assume the evidence was all harmful. So the timing might be related to that.
replyHe got tired of WPEngine not contributing back to wordpress, so he made it his mission to try and get them to pitch in.
replyHe tried to extort them. Hosting providers have been selling Wordpress hosting for years without "giving back"
replyDoes Wordpress "give back" to PHP and Linux?
Automattic are the biggest sponsors of the PHP foundation so they do give back there.
replyI think they gave like $100k as a donation, which is great. But they were demanding WPE I think for around 32 million a year or something nuts. You could argue PHP is way more important to WordPress than WPE is.
replyThat's why, at a conference fully paid for by WPEngine, he announced that WPEngine had never paid for anything.
replyHe had a perfectly good example of how to do that productively. His friend Dries Buytaert over in Drupal land has had a commit credit system going for years that has worked well enough that people are constantly trying to game it. Instead he went for the jugular. I really don’t think he’s okay.
replyWordPress is free software. Its users are under no obligation to contribute to its development, or to give money to Automattic.
replyDoes WPEngine have any obligation to contribute back? How is WordPress licensed?
replyOnly to the extent the company pledged to do so.
replyIt did pledge, and the follow-up on that pledge was minimal.
They do not. It's GPL
replyDidn't he start that campaign at a conference for WordPress developers funded by WP engine?
I don't have any insight into what they did or didn't contribute, but it seems their obligation was zero and their level was quite a bit higher than that.
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